


Discrete Structures

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Compliant, Hive Mind, Marital Problems, Multi, Newmannessa, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Movie, Pregnancy, Pseudoscience, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:41:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life and times of Vanessa Gottlieb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. London, August 2024

**Author's Note:**

> This is 10,000 words and counting of headcanon dumpage. Porny bits start in chapter two.
> 
> ETA: This story was part of the PacRim Minibang, and tentakrule did amazing artwork for it (from chapter four), right here: http://tentakrule.tumblr.com/post/87179883402/newt-takes-a-deep-breath-as-far-as-vanessa-can

The reporter is a cute little thing, and Vanessa envies her layering skills. She also stands out like a bruise in the all-white studio, with that straight black hair and plum cardigan. She tries to stay out of the way, but Vanessa’s eyes are drawn to her as if by gravity.

“Yuna, could you lift your chin, please?” Vanessa returns to the camera and checks the viewfinder once more, but apart from An Yuna’s chin, nothing at all has changed. The two Jaeger pilots are statue-still and stone-faced in front of the infinity backdrop. So-Yi is down on her left knee, the better to present the backwards hook shape of the carbon prosthetic that starts halfway down her right calf.

Vanessa presses the remote, and the shutter clicks. “And could we get one with the medal, please?”

So-Yi’s dourness evaporates with a broad, infectious grin, and she fishes in her jacket to retrieve the gold medal she won last month in Paris. Yuna snorts, and Vanessa snaps a picture at the exact moment that she rolls her eyes, and another when both women sober again. So-Yi keeps her medal suspended as Vanessa releases the camera from the tripod and gets down in front of her, f-stop high and shutter speed slow to keep Yuna in focus over So-Yi’s shoulder.

“Taking Olympic gold six months after losing a limb is a lofty goal for most people,” Ms. Sokolov observes.

“Yuna kept me in good shape all this time,” So-Yi says, and grins back at her co-pilot. Vanessa manages to capture that, too. The candids probably won’t ever be published, but she keeps a personal collection from all her shoots. “Besides, I get bored without a Jaeger.”

“Why didn’t you compete, Yuna?”

Yuna notoriously despises the press, and Vanessa apologized profusely for the accidental scheduling overlap, but she insisted it would be fine. Now she gazes evenly at the reporter and says, “I knew what my chances would be.”

Ms. Sokolov lets that sit while So-Yi’s grin gets more smug. “Do either of you ever miss the Drift?” she says after a moment.

The former pilots exchange a glance that Vanessa reads as just a little wistful. “I’ve gotten pretty good at telling what So-Yi is thinking.”

“Sometimes when I start to ramble, I hear Yuna telling me to shut up in my brain.”

The reporter perks up. “Ghost Drifting? Is that a real thing?”

Yuna reaches into the pocket of her jeans and retrieves her wallet. She throws it, underhand, and So-Yi’s right hand snatches it from the air when it’s still slightly behind her.

“I bet you two are the funnest at parties,” says Vanessa.

“It’s no big deal,” So-Yi says, tossing the wallet over her shoulder. Yuna catches it effortlessly. “I know married couples who can do that. You spend enough time around another person, Drift or no, you develop an extra sense just for them.”

Something turns over inside Vanessa--her heart, she hopes, and not her stomach again. She’s taken too many bathroom breaks already today. “That should do it, ladies,” she says, placing the camera back on the tripod. “Thanks for your patience.”

So-Yi accepts Yuna’s hand and stands up, but neither pilot moves from the backdrop. “If you don’t mind,” So-Yi says, “we’d like you to take one more picture.”

Vanessa raises a brow, and Yuna leans up to whisper in her ear. “Why don’t we wait until after the interview?” Vanessa asks, pointedly not looking at Ms. Sokolov.

“We don’t mind if she sees it,” Yuna says, and Vanessa looks her in the eye to make sure she’s serious. She is, as always. Vanessa nods and returns to the tripod, while So-Yi and Yuna take off the Nova Hyperion commemorative jackets that Vanessa designed, and then take off their shirts as well.

Naomi Sokolov draws an audible breath. The Jaeger pilots turn in unison, backs to Vanessa, and put their arms comfortably around each other’s shoulders. The circuitry scars spread across So-Yi’s right side and Yuna’s left, perfect mirrors pressed tight to each other from shoulder to thigh. Under the studio’s lights, the pattern is delicate, almost wing-like. Vanessa swallows, moved as ever when intent and design leave such beautiful traces, and frames them in the viewfinder. “Wait.”

She goes to the far wall and brings back the Polaroid instead. “This way there’s no chance they’ll get leaked,” she says, and takes two pictures.

“One for yourself, Vanessa,” So-Yi says over her shoulder, and Vanessa takes one more, and waits for them to develop, and peels the paper away. The pilots put their shirts back on and come over to see, then thank her and take their prints.

“So-Yi could pilot again,” says Ms. Sokolov once they’re gone. “There must be a way to modify the feedback cradle for a prosthetic.”

It’s not that simple, and Vanessa can tell her so in detail. It’s true that late-model Jaegers have operating systems sophisticated enough to compensate for an amputee pilot, or some other physical disability. So-Yi could switch sides to favor her leg, could adjust for imbalance in motion and a multitude of other factors, but the fact is that there aren’t any new Jaegers to adjust for her. The Nova Hyperion crew are physically fit, with four kills to their names, every inch a couple of young heroes, and they’re never going to ride again.

But she doesn’t say that. Instead she goes to hang up the heavy Jaeger-shaped jackets they were modeling, and when she opens her mouth, what comes out is, “Do you have children, Ms. Sokolov?”

“What? Uh, no. Why do you ask?”

Vanessa shakes her head, pulls her glasses off. “Sorry. Long day.” And a long night coming up, waiting for dawn in Hong Kong. “I’m sure So-Yi would love to keep jockeying, but you and I both know where things are headed right now.”

“Is there still enough support out there to warrant what you’re doing?”

Vanessa almost tells the reporter to answer that herself. She must know; of course there’s enough support. The people still love Jaegers--love them even more, it seems, now that they’ve begun to fall. It’s the brass who have given up. “Every sale helps the program,” Vanessa says solemnly, “and as long as I can help, it’s warranted.”

“Has it been difficult to adjust to the Jaeger program being your life now?”

Here it comes. “The Jaeger program is not my life,” Vanessa tells her with a bland smile. “The Jaeger program exists so that I can have a life of my own, without the fear of being crushed by an enormous foot.”

Undaunted, Ms. Sokolov says, “I understand the distinction, but surely you understand what it looks like. You haven’t modeled professionally in over a year. Around the time you married Doctor Gottlieb, in fact.”

She tries not to snap at her. “Are you here to ask me about my husband?”

The reporter breaks her gaze. “I’m here to ask you about you.”

Good. Vanessa pulls the battery from her camera and puts it in the charger, then plugs the memory card into the reader on her desktop. “Ever since university, I’ve been in a line of work where I had absolutely no control. I chose my jobs, sure, but the clothes, the hair and makeup, the Photoshopping, the magazines that ran the ads--none of it had anything to do with me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the work. I found it very fulfilling, moreso than people would expect. But from the moment I had the idea for the jackets, it was different. I did the sketches, sampled a hundred fabrics, sewed the prototype myself, cleared it with the PPDC, set my factory workers’ wages, photographed D’onofrio and Doctor Lightcap, and pitched the Brawler Yukon jacket to retailers. I’m sure you enjoy writing, Ms. Sokolov, but imagine if you were suddenly the editor-in-chief, and the publisher, as well. Would you want to go back right away?”

There’s silence for a long time. Vanessa starts to scroll through the photos of Yuna and So-Yi.

“Any idea which Jaeger you’ll adapt next?” the reporter asks after a while.

Adapt is a wonderful word for it. A wonderful word in general, and Vanessa will have to make it her own. “After the show they put on last week, I’d love to get specs on Striker Eureka.” It would be bolero-length, to mimic the silhouette of the chest. And the shoulders would be a nightmare to duplicate; the wearer would need to be as broad as a barn just to give them the right support. Not a problem if she gets Striker’s pilots to model.

“The Sydney Shatterdome is locked up tight to all inquiries,” says Ms. Sokolov. Vanessa is aware. Her last name didn’t count for anything the last time she tried. That’s what happens when there are just three active Shatterdomes left in the world. “Although--”

Vanessa glances at the reporter over her shoulder. Ms. Sokolov looks conflicted, but after a moment’s consideration she presses on. “What if you used a Jaeger whose specs have already been released? One that fell years ago?” She gives Vanessa a little smile, ready to pull an ace from her sleeve. “One they’re restoring?”

“Naomi,” Vanessa says, leaning back against her desk, “tell me more.”

* * *

 

Twenty two hundred hours GMT is six hundred the next day in Hong Kong. That is precisely eight minutes after Hermann’s alarm sounds, which allows him just enough time to do some stretches, get dressed, and make tea before he answers the video call Tendo forwards to his tablet.

Vanessa knows his routine, and it seems to have only gotten smoother in the month and a half since he went to Hong Kong. Perhaps it’s because she isn’t there to distract him. He never fails to answer her calls. He is always waiting.

“Good morning,” she says.

“Good evening,” he says, and they smile at each other. It’s forced for both of them, but it withers on Vanessa’s face too quickly. “How did you spend your day?”

“An interview.” She’s sure she told him before.

“Right, yes. Which one was it this time?”

Vanessa holds back a sigh. “ _Vanity Fair_.”

Hermann nods like these two words mean something to him. “That’s prestigious, isn’t it? More or less.”

“More or less,” she agrees, and she’s not sure where to go from here. She needs to get it out fast. This is the sort of thing people are coy about, making it a game, sending nauseatingly cute announcements to their friends, taking pictures every week. She can’t bring herself to make a game of it, but she can’t just say it straight away, either. “I took a test this morning.”

Hermann squints at her through the screen. “What sort of test?”

“The sort you pee on,” she says flatly. It’s on the bedside table, in case he wants visual confirmation.

Hermann is pale to begin with, and the tablet’s camera washes him out even more, but as realization sets in Vanessa is certain that he goes a shade or two whiter. “Oh God,” he whispers.

There is a bit more devastation than she was hoping to see on his face. But then, she didn’t expect Hermann to get all mawkish about becoming a father.

“How much time do we have left?” She’s never asked him that before. She’s never had any reason to ask before.

He shakes his head. “I haven’t finished the models yet.”

“More or less than seven months?” she presses.

He looks at her for a long time. “Less.”

Less than two hundred and ten days until there are at least two kaiju on this side of the Breach at once. Or, in an optimist’s world, less than two hundred and ten days until they find a way to close the Breach. She has to figure out how she will spend those days.

“Would it be easier if you were here?”

No, it would not. “I’m here because we agreed,” Vanessa tells him. “What would you do, in my place?”

Hermann’s expression sours. “I would have divorced me a year ago.”

“Stop that. I knew what I was doing.”

“You know that isn’t true. Neither one of us planned for this.”

The sigh gets out after all, and she kneads the spot between her eyes that always starts to ache when she argues with Hermann. Semantics and hair-splitting for days. And what a stupid thing to argue about. “That is the very definition of a surprise. I’m not making any decisions right now. I have to think.”

“Vanessa.” She drops her hand and meets his gaze. “Whatever you decide, I’ll…”

What can he say now, halfway across the world, on the cusp of the apocalypse? How can he possibly account for all the variables, after they both missed one this important? They don’t make each other promises. Promises are lies.

“I’ll be here,” he finishes, and the discontent in his eyes says that he knows exactly how weak that sounds.

Still, it makes Vanessa’s throat close up. Bloody hormones. She doesn’t want to cry during this call any more than she wants to fight, so she’d best change the subject. “Is it true that they’re restoring Gipsy Danger?”

Hermann blinks at her. “Ah. I don’t have any information about--”

“Hermann. Is it true?”

She sees his jaw clench. “Yes.”

“Have there been any major alterations to the specs?”

“I don’t have any information about the restoration project,” he repeats. “Security is tighter now.”

Vanessa would like to put her husband in a room with Naomi Sokolov and charge admission to watch them go in circles. “I don’t want to know what the alterations are,” she says in as soothing a tone as she can muster. “I just want to know if there are any.”

Hermann is the one who sighs now, and relents. “Nothing you can see from the outside.”

“Good.” The Danger jacket was ready for production by the end of 2019, and she had booked the Becket brothers for a March shoot. Then Knifehead happened.

“If you publicize it, they’ll know I told you.”

“I won’t,” she says, biting back the _darling_ she might have added fondly some other time, but which would only be sardonic now. “I’ll wait until it’s general knowledge, and then I’ll be ready.”

This seems to satisfy him. After a long, calculating silence he says, “You know I’m proud of what you do.”

“By Jove! What have I done to warrant such an outpouring of sentiment?”

Irritation flashes across his face, replaced by practiced blankness, which he affects when he wants to rise above mundane circumstances, usually just before he scores the last word. A beatific detachment. “I only thought I ought to remind you. Sleep well, Vanessa.” Her screen goes dark.

Scowling, she takes off her glasses and puts her tablet away. How long does it take to grow that extra sense? Can it be done from six thousand miles away, or will this be the death knell to their slow decline, the unraveling of the last ten years? The hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is that they’re deluding themselves. Wasting time. There’s so little of that left.

When she finally falls asleep, she dreams of a poisoned sky, oceans of Kaiju Blue. Vanessa walks through a mutant landscape that might once have been familiar, and huddles beneath grotesque organic shapes when the ammonia rain falls. There is something small in her arms, but she never looks down.

* * *

Alison Choi keeps standard hours, in contrast to her husband, who seems never to sleep. Tendo patches Vanessa’s call through to the Shatterdome quarters he shares, whenever he does sleep, with his wife and son.

“Hey!” Alison greets her with a dazzling grin. She’s chopped her hair off again sometime since the last time Vanessa called her, and it’s back to its natural color.

“Hey,” Vanessa says, hoping her smile looks halfway convincing. “How’s Felix?”

“Just got him to sleep.” It’s noon, Vanessa’s time, and she’s spent all morning waiting for this call. “He tried to say ‘Jaeger’ today, but it came out ‘Yoo’.”

“Ahh, yes, the Yoo program, with its famous Yoos Choochoo Affa and Wokkan Spatter.” Alison laughs, and Vanessa tries, but doesn’t feel it. “I have a problem,” she adds.

“And I have a wrench, but I’m not sure it will reach far enough to fix it this time.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“I see,” Alison says softly, and Vanessa is relieved that she doesn’t congratulate her immediately. If anyone would understand, it’s her. “Well, I could throw the wrench at Hermann.”

“No need. I’ve already told him. What did you and Tendo do when you found out?”

“Oh, we lost. Our. Shit.” And that was over a year ago--things were better then. Not much, but before the shutdown, at least.

“And how did you… come to a decision?”

Alison tilts her head to one side, and looks at Vanessa in a way that assures her she knows exactly what Vanessa can’t ask outright. “We both wanted kids, you know? So that was a pretty big factor. We made a list of everything that could go wrong, and a list of everything that could go right, and basically the only thing on the right list was that we’d end up with a kid. So we did it. But Vanessa, as far as anyone knows right now, the world is ending. No one is going to judge you, least of all me.”

Vanessa can’t express what that means to her. “What if we lose?”

“Then we’re all dead. Problem solved.”

“No, I mean, what if we lose, and there’s still time after that? I’m as far from the Pacific as anyone can get. The kaiju might take some time to get here. So what if we lose, and in the days or weeks afterward, I’m dragging myself to whatever’s left of Hong Kong to find out if he’s still alive? Jesus, what if I’m doing that with an infant strapped to me?”

“Vanessa. If we lose, and you come to Hong Kong to find out if Hermann’s still alive, you’ll never know, because he’ll be on his way to London to find you. Walking, if he has to. If you want to find each other, one of you will have to stand still.”

“Does it have to be me?”

“I thought you two agreed.”

“Yes. It’s just…” She blows out a breath, deeply unsatisfied with where this is going. Deeply unsatisfied with any conversational options at all, at this juncture. If Alison were here, she’d turn on the telly and let Vanessa lean on her and they wouldn’t have to say anything. Since that’s not an option and video calls generally involve talking, Vanessa switches gears. “I wish you and I had gone through the academy together. You know we’re Drift compatible.”

“Hella,” Alison agrees. They’ve only ever joked about it before. “But we’d probably be dead already. And pregnant pilots can’t jockey.”

“Then you would have been my cautionary tale, and I would never have gone off the pill.”

Alison gives her the finger, and Vanessa sticks her tongue out. “Hey, have you heard yet? The Sydney ‘Dome is getting phased out. Striker Eureka and all the rest will be decommissioned in a few months.”

“No shit?” Two Shatterdomes left, and the ladies of Nova Hyperion had dropped hints about Vladivostok as well.

Alison nods grimly. “Their database is already being transferred over here.”

Vanessa’s hands start to itch. “Alison, you know I wouldn’t ask if--”

“Just give me a couple months,” she pledges. “You’ll get the specs--sanitized versions, like the others.”

That will work just fine. Sanitized means external dimensions only, no details on the Jaegers’ inner workings. There’s a rumor that Striker Eureka has a set of retractable blades, but the Hansens have never seen fit to use them in combat, and there isn’t really a way to work that into the jacket. They're supposed to look convincing, not actually be weaponized. “You’re a gem.”

“Anything I can do to help.” No matter which way this goes, Vanessa will need to stay busy to cope. “What are you planning today?”

She checks the tablet’s clock. “A train ride. I need to do some sightseeing.”

“You should come visit sometime. Crash with us, if you and Hermann are still…” Alison shrugs.

“You, me, and Tendo in bed together? In your dreams.”

Alison blows her a kiss, and Vanessa grins and signs off. 


	2. Hong Kong, January 2025

The best shot of the day is the one where Gipsy Danger’s pilots are leaning toward each other, Raleigh bent a bit, their foreheads pressed together as they stare into each other’s eyes. Vanessa got in close for that. The jackets are almost completely out of frame--it won’t do for publicity, but it’s a nice one for the collection. She’ll send them a print.

The best shot she can actually use is of Mako Mori facing the camera, jacket zipped up to her collarbone, chin high and expression cool. Raleigh’s back is against hers; he frames her with his body, head turned to glance over his shoulder.

Operation Pitfall succeeded a week ago. This is the first time a camera has been near Becket and Mori since they dropped into the ocean to close the Breach.

Vanessa has not slept in a day and a half. She landed on the Shatterdome helipad four hours ago, and all indications are that she’ll be taking off again as soon as her gear is packed.

“Hey, saviors of the universe,” calls Tendo Choi from across the hangar deck. The Rangers glance at each other, and there’s so much in that one look that Vanessa can’t help but take another photo. “Briefing in LOCCENT in ten minutes. Sorry to cut it short, Vanessa.”

“I have plenty to work with,” she assures him.

“Okie-doke. Hermann should be out of his interview anytime now.”

Vanessa can’t think of anything to say to that, so she nods, and as Tendo leaves she turns back to Becket and Mori, who smile at her. “How long has it been since you’ve seen each other?” asks Mako.

“Seven months.” Vanessa bends to put the camera’s battery in the charger, and hopes her hair hides the tension on her face.

Becket whistles low. “I couldn’t do it.”

“We both had our work,” she demurs.

“The jackets are perfect,” Mako says, shrugging out of hers. “As close as we’ll get to being back inside her.”

Vanessa hangs it up. “Have you started on the next version yet?”

The Rangers regard each other again, apprehensive this time. “There are schematics,” says Becket. “But whether or not they ever make it to production…”

“Depends on funding, yes. I’ll do everything I can to help. I’m quite certain demand for the jackets will outstrip supply.”

Raleigh Becket nods to her, and it’s hard to miss seeing Mako in that action--it’s almost a bow.

From the far entry bay, she hears approaching voices. They’re accompanied by a rhythmic tapping Vanessa would recognize anywhere. “Please excuse me,” she says to the Rangers, and turns to meet the group of people--techs, mostly--crossing the hangar toward LOCCENT.

As she approaches, one of the only people not wearing coveralls turns toward Hermann and says, “I just don’t see why we can’t bring a tiny sample with us, you know? We still have Otachi Junior’s secondary brain. It wouldn’t take much, just a portable tank and cycler and some monitoring equipment--maybe an extra two hundred and fifty kilos, nothing the Jumphawks can’t handle.”

Hermann’s eyes roll so far in their sockets, he can probably see the inside of his skull. “Newton, it’s never going to--” He spots Vanessa, and freezes, eyes locked not on her face, but on the roundness of her stomach.

She can feel everyone staring, so she keeps moving toward him. This is supposed to be a reunion. There should probably be kissing. Vanessa leans forward and puts her lips on Hermann’s mouth, which closes just in time. “Hi,” she says when she pulls away, and gives him a small smile.

He’s never been one for public displays, and just above his buttoned collar, she sees his neck flush bright red. Hermann clears his throat. “You’re here.”

The techs pass around them without a second glance. Hermann has, no doubt, maintained his reputation for impassivity on a good day, thorns on a bad one, so the coldness of his response would surprise nobody.

Well, almost nobody. “What the hell, dude?”

Hermann looks away from her belly long enough to nod toward the other man. “Vanessa, this is my colleague, Doctor Newton Geiszler. Newton, this is Vanessa, my wife.”

“Right! Your wife. The one I knew you had. It’s really good to finally meet you, Vanessa.”

She looks Doctor Geiszler over and tries to imagine her husband willingly Drifting with this man. “The carrot thief?” she says to Hermann in a stage whisper.

Hermann _hmph_ s, and offers her his arm, and she takes it. They proceed side by side as Geiszler sputters behind them. “Is that all you told her about me?”

It’s only fair, Vanessa wants to say. Hermann didn’t tell him anything at all about her.

“And how have you been occupying yourself since you saved the world?” she says, speaking low enough now that she doesn’t have to keep up appearances for the others. None of her calls have made it through since Pitfall. The first she heard from anyone in the Shatterdome was when Tendo informed her that a V-50 was inbound to pick her up, and she’d need her camera.

“I’ve finished coding the Mark VI operating system. It was already near completion before we got defunded. How…” He glances to his left and down again, even less accustomed than she is to the planetary mass she carries over her hips now. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Healthy.” Maybe it’s cruel to surprise him like this; the video calls only ever showed their faces, and she never told him what she decided. On the other hand, he never asked.

“Where did this come from?” she continues, reaching with her free hand to tug at the fur-lined hood of his parka, several sizes too large for his frame.

“The Kaidanovskys.” She immediately regrets her mocking tone. “My other coat was contaminated,” he adds, pitching his voice loud enough for Doctor Geiszler to hear.

“I said I was sorry!”

“Are the Gipsy Danger jackets in production?” Hermann asks. Vanessa nods as they move out of the hangar and into the elevator, shutting the door before Geiszler can catch up. “And Striker?”

She still isn’t sure where she stands on that. “I’m waiting. What do you think? Poor taste?”

“Not as long as it’s done with respect.”

Vanessa recalls the only visit she paid Hermann in Lima, where she met Marshal Pentecost for the first time and glimpsed a teenaged Chuck Hansen arguing with Mako about which Jaeger would win a hypothetical fight. Respect she can do. It’s the rest of the world that might not understand. But then, that’s been the risk all along.

Hermann turns to face her, and gives her a kiss on the cheek, and as she blinks at him he says, “I only managed the second half of the sentence before. I’m glad you’re here.”

By the time the elevator door opens, they’re composed again, Vanessa’s arm linked with his, expressions neutral.

“All right, kiddos,” Tendo says once the remnants of the Shatterdome staff and ground crews have gathered in LOCCENT, overlooking the empty hangar bay. “Hope you’re all packed, because this victory tour is hitting the road in the morning. Nine Shatterdomes in fourteen days, and then we’re back to work before people get tired of seeing our gorgeous faces. At 0800 sharp, we’re all going to stand on risers on the helipad and listen to some suit talk about what a great thing we did with all the money they didn’t give us. Dress blues if you’ve got ‘em; ground crews represent with your colors.

“Entry order is top row down. I’ll lead LOCCENT staff in; Alison, you’re mama duck for Crimson and Cherno’s ground crews on the second row. Sylvia, head up Striker and Gipsy’s techs, followed by Doctor Gottlieb, Mrs. Gottlieb, and Doctor Geiszler. Then the Marshal and the Rangers will march straight to the podium to get something shiny. When it’s over, stick with your group and hop on a Jumphawk. Luggage will be checked. Rinse and repeat for every stop. Any questions so far?”

“Am I supposed to be on that roster?” Vanessa asks. “I didn’t have anything to do with all this.”

“You lent us your husband for a while,” says Marshal Hansen. Vanessa looks him over: he’s aged about ten years since she last saw footage of him, and his eyes are tired, but there’s still a smile in them. At his feet squats Max, observing the conversation and clearly hoping for belly rubs.

“And your contribution from sales was not insubstantial,” Mako adds.

Raleigh says what she doesn’t. “Kept us in bread and meatloaf.”

Vanessa holds up her hands in surrender. “As long as you’re all sure you want me up there.”

“Yes,” say about a dozen voices at once, Alison’s the loudest. Hermann echoes them an instant later.

“Everybody loves Vanessa,” Tendo confirms, marking his clipboard like it was an item on the agenda. “Moving right along, this is our itinerary.” He pulls it up on the main terminal, and then ports that to every other display in the Shatterdome’s nerve center. “From here we head north. Nagasaki, Tokyo, Vladivostok, and then across the pond to Anchorage, where the Becket boys could see Russia from their house. Then L.A., Panama City, Lima, and a nice long flight to Sydney to wrap it all up. Most of these are short hops, in and out. We’re staying two days in Tokyo, Anchorage, and Sydney, for obvious reasons.”

He looks up from the terminal. “Everyone’s scheduled to be interviewed. Everyone. Every day. It’s probably the last moment of glory we get. After this it’s back to toiling in obscurity, just the way we like it. That’s all, folks. Get food, get sleep, and get ready.”

Vanessa carries her camera and tripod and bag to Hermann’s quarters, one of the few in the Shatterdome with keycard entry. He’s uptight about having his own securely locked space, where entrails cannot encroach, but also, Shatterdome quarters have very heavy doors--not easy to open with a cane in one hand.

“Here,” he says when they’re inside, taking an access badge from inside the desk. It’s hers, from the last time she visited him, two ‘Domes ago. “There’s a latrine through that door, but showers are down the hall to the left.”

Vanessa nods and clips the badge to her dress; it rests at an angle on the curve of her belly. Hermann’s eyes are drawn there once again. She’s about to remind him where her face is when he opens his mouth, closes it again, and finally says, “How did you decide?”

She sits at the desk, and he perches on the edge of the single bed, which looks far too narrow for both of them. Perhaps she’ll be on a folding cot tonight. “The day after I told you, I took the train to Cambridge. Ended up in the Mill Pub, like always. I ordered a half pint of bitter before I knew what I was doing, then drank it anyway. Too early to cause any damage.” She swallows, rests her hands on her knees. “I sat there, looking out at the river, and from nowhere I had this thought: Cam would be a nice name. I couldn’t shake it. It started with the name, and went on to thinking about her growing up, chasing Felix around, studying, graduating… maybe, someday, doing something as important as what you do. And I tried to think about what I’d be losing, if I went ahead with it, whether or not the world ended. I couldn’t think of anything. So I went ahead with it.”

Hermann has his eyes closed now, as if he’s trying to picture it, too. “Her?”

Vanessa smiles, just a little. “Sorry for the spoiler.”

“Cam’s a bloody terrible name.”

The smile disappears. “Oh, for God’s sake, Hermann, I know. I have since discarded that possibility. Her name isn’t the point.”

“What if she grows up to work in a Tesco?”

She could absolutely kick him in the leg right now. “Then feel free to deny that your genetic input had anything to do with her, you ass.”

Vanessa gets up to pace, but Hermann catches her hand and opens his eyes, his face crinkled with his dry, dry wit. That look always pulls at her, but she’s not finished with him. “When I was thinking of her, I wasn’t thinking of you,” she says, and Hermann lets go of her at once. She stands before the desk lamp so he’s in her shadow, and stares down at him.  “Or me. I didn’t see us raising her together, or me raising her alone, and it didn’t make a difference. Either way, she’s going to be wonderful. I can do this with you, or without you.”

Vanessa has delivered a few ultimatums in their arguments. This is the first one where she truly doesn’t know the stakes.

“Then why are you here?” Hermann snaps. He anticipates that she’ll remind him of the session with the Rangers, and specifies, “In my quarters, right now. Why bother?”

She lifts her chin. “For the sake of appearances, evidently. You tell me, Hermann. Is this hollow?”

He plants the tip of his cane and gets up. Standing straight now, no trace of a hunch, he’s at eye level with her. “We have problems, Vanessa,” he says, his voice softer than his expression. “They’re not the sort that can be fixed by adding a helpless human being. Just shoved out of the way and ignored until they boil over again, all the worse for having an audience.”

“Do you think there’s any hope of fixing them before the helpless human being enters the equation, or are you giving up now?”

Hermann deflates, scrubs at his face with the heel of his free hand. “I’m going to bed.”

How bloody typical. Vanessa turns on her heel and puts her shoulder to the door. He starts to call after her, but as soon as she gets the hatch open he shuts his mouth. Never does want to cause a scene. She stomps out into the corridor and lets the door clang behind her.

Stenciled signs on the corridor walls lead her to the mess hall. She craves a cigarette and a gin and tonic in the worst way, but by the time she gets there she remembers that Hong Kong’s port isn’t quite that open, and also she’s pregnant. She isn’t even hungry. She glances about, hoping to see Alison, but Engineering will likely be busy into the night, packing the fleet of Jumphawks. Too embarrassed to walk back out again after coming all that way, Vanessa gets a cup of water and sits at an empty table to brood.

“Hey, can I join you?” She looks up, not sure how much time has passed, to find Doctor Geiszler standing on the other side of the table with a plate of noodles and a PPDC-branded energy soda. Vanessa nods, and he plops down on the bench. “I’m starving. Trying to get everything wrapped up in the lab. There’s still a mostly-functional secondary brain in there, and I gotta make sure it’ll survive with nobody here but security for two weeks.”

This line of conversation sounds like it will get gruesome fast, but Vanessa can’t deny that she’s curious. “Surely there’s no need to Drift with a kaiju again?”

“Not anytime soon, I hope,” says Geiszler around a mouthful of noodles. “But I feel kind of responsible to it, you know? You ask any Jaeger pilot, they’ll tell you that when they Drift, it’s not only with their co-pilot--it’s with the Jaeger too. Hermann and I didn’t just Drift with each other. Otachi Junior helped save the world, even if she only came here to eat dudes and break stuff.”

There is something about this sentiment that appeals to Vanessa, a fairness of spirit that feels very human indeed. Or maybe she’s drawn in by Doctor Geiszler’s affability, so far removed from Hermann’s behavior. “She?"

“Uh, an un-scientific assumption. I mean, Otachi was pregnant, and they don’t have much in common with seahorses. We don’t really know how biological sex works in the Anteverse, but the kaiju weren’t intended to breed, which means biology defaults to female.” He slurps a noodle. Witnessing that does not make Vanessa gag, miraculously, so she might be able to handle baby food.

“Then what happened with Otachi? Did life find a way?”

Geiszler gets the reference, and smirks. “Nah. She was built that way. Otachi was a time bomb. If she’d stayed alive long enough, she would have given birth to a fully developed baby kaiju, and then we would have been fu--” He finally notices her raised brow, and glances at her belly, and winces.

Vanessa smiles to show she doesn’t take it personally. She gets a fork from the supply at the center of the table, and takes some of Geiszler’s noodles. “Time bomb feels accurate, most days.”

“You know, you should have been briefing us all earlier. You have more experience than anyone else here at being up in front of people with cameras.” He’s so blithe about it, trying to make up for the almost-insult, she’s not convinced he even realizes he’s flirting. Would be falling over himself to apologize, in fact, if he realized.

“I’m a touch out of practice,” she replies. It’s no surprise that she finds thoughtlessness so charming by comparison to Hermann, who is deliberate with insults and compliments alike. Again she tries to imagine them being Drift compatible. Every pair of Jaeger pilots she’s ever met has been at least friendly with each other, and repeated Drifts made their personalities overlap.

Doctor Geiszler seems not to have heard her. His head is tilted slightly, eyes half closed, like he’s listening to something far away. “Hermann’s still awake,” he says when he comes out of it. “His brain’s going a mile a minute.”

She sets her fork down. “Ghost Drifting?”

“Kinda. It’s actually a product of the kaiju hive mind, we think. Ghost Drifting is retaining a physical synchronization, but the closest comparison I can think of for this is synesthesia. Sometimes when I’m doing something, whatever Hermann is experiencing gets overlaid. Or if we’re in the same place at the same time, I have déjà vu. It’s not just me. He’s confirmed it.”

“That’s…”

“Creepy? Yeah.” He remembers to stop talking long enough to take a bite. “I have to admit, my first reaction when I met you earlier was terror. _Aww shit, there’s two of him_.”

“And now?” Vanessa asks, forcing herself to postpone feeling insulted until he gets to the point.

Doctor Geiszler squirms under her gaze. She loves when people do that. “Uh, well, he’s still awake and you’re sitting here, so that says something, I guess.”

She picks her fork back up and stabs some noodles. “Potentially that we’re more alike than anyone would assume,” she says darkly.

“Okay, Mrs. Gottlieb, set me straight then. What’s the deal with you two?”

“What did Hermann tell you the deal is?”

“He didn’t. I’ve been sharing a lab with that guy for seven months and he never mentioned you. And that’s cool, his life is his life, whatever, but I didn’t even see you in the Drift.”

That feels like a punch to the gut, worse than anything Hermann could say to her himself. Vanessa stares at the tabletop until she trusts herself to speak again, and during that time Newton seems to realize that maybe he didn’t need to tell her that. Finally she takes a breath and says, “Does Hermann ever cut you down, verbally?”

“Only twenty times a day.”

“I’m just as bad,” she tells him. “And put us together, well, two tongues as sharp as ours can’t help but slice at each other. There was a time when that made things fun. Nothing ever stuck. Eventually I would kiss him to shut him up, or one of us would say something so awful it was funny, or he would start swearing in German and I would laugh, and that would be that. But we stopped finding things funny after a while. And by the time he was transferred here, we were considering a trial separation. The honeymoon has been over for some time. We never went on one, in fact.”

Geiszler chews at the inside of his cheek as he regards her. “We’re about to go on a victory tour,” he says quietly. “Make that the honeymoon.”

“I doubt they’d be okay with me tagging along,” Vanessa scoffs.

“‘They’ who?” Geiszler says, brow furrowed. “Tendo thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas, and I’m pretty sure those are the exact words he’d use. Marshal Hansen wouldn’t have any objections. The Jumphawks are made to haul Jaegers. They can handle a pregnant lady--uh, that is, there’s totally--Vanessa, I didn’t mean it like that.”

She catches herself staring at the tabletop again, and shakes her head. “I know. It’s not that. It’s… you can’t just start all over.”

“If you say so,” Geiszler says.

She finishes her water in one swig, and stands. “I ought to get back. Thanks for the noodles, Newton.”

“Call me Newt,” he says as she leaves the mess hall.

The plan she forms on the walk back is half-baked and probably doomed to fail, but it’s worth a shot. She knocks on Hermann’s door, and when she sees light through the peephole she looks back over her shoulder, biting her lip. The door swings open. “Did you forget your keycard?”

“Oh, Doctor Gottlieb,” she says in a breathless, more drawling version of her own accent. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I heard you’re leaving in the morning, and I just knew I’d regret it if I didn’t tell you how much I admire you, and how amazing it is, what you accomplished with just your brain. And, um, I was hoping maybe you’d have time for one autograph?” She considers twisting her hair around her finger, but it would probably be too much.

Hermann squints at her like she’s grown a tentacle. “Get inside already,” he hisses, and she makes a quiet but high-pitched sound of delight, and does.

“What are you doing, Vanessa?” Hermann demands once the door is closed again. He’s in his sleep pants, but the bed is still neatly made.

Reluctantly, Vanessa breaks character. “It doesn’t excite you at all, does it? My God, you’re an android.”

“No, playacting adultery does not excite me. I took my ring off two months ago when I had some swelling. I haven’t been unfaithful to you; I’m not going to be while on this tour. Was that the purpose of your experiment?”

Vanessa sits back down at the desk and rubs the spot between her eyes. “It’s not entrapment, Hermann. That doesn’t even make logical sense.”

Hermann leans his head back like he’s beseeching the ceiling for help. “Then what?”

“Do you ever miss the time when all our arguments ended with sex?”

“Ah,” Hermann says crisply. “If it’s sex you want, just ask. That, at least, is something we can still--”

She’s on her feet again at once, startling both of them. She puts her hands on either side of his face and forces him to look at her. “I want _you_ ,” she says, meaning it, sure of it now. “I want all our messy, petty problems. I want to solve them. I want our child to grow up with both parents. Can you manage that, Hermann?”

He gazes at her for one more long, unpredictable moment, then presses his lips to hers.

The thing is, no matter how they pissed each other off before, the sex has always been spectacular. Every time is just as good as it was ten years ago, stumbling back from the Mill Pub, pulling each other’s clothes off in the entryway of his flat, giggling when they tripped in the dark, young, so young, Hermann with no cane, Vanessa retaining teenage gawkiness into her early twenties, K-Day nearly six months ago, practically a different planet, tragic but so very foreign, as far as anything could be from them. Every time she kisses him like this, hands clutching his hair, it’s time travel.

It’s different now, of course. Hermann can’t seem to get close enough, around her belly. He pulls away for air, presses his cheek to hers, and after a moment, gets down on the concrete floor, and that’s unnecessary, it really is--the floor is cold. “Hermann, don’t kneel,” she gasps as he slides the hem of her dress up to her hips.

He looks up at her and says, “I want you right here,” and the need turns his voice raw, and it’s suddenly hard to stay standing. Vanessa pulls the dress off entirely and Hermann makes a sound low in his throat, and he leans forward and she feels his breath on her thighs, and then his lips.

She finds the desk behind her, and holds on. “Just… don’t--”

“I know,” he murmurs against her skin as he eases her knickers down. “I’ll be very careful.” And he is. He always is. Before, she liked to watch his head move against her, see the veins pop out on his neck, but now there’s a bump in the way, so she looks at the line of his vertebrae, the way his skin shifts just a little over his ribs when he breathes deep through his nose, the twitching of his hips as he keeps himself balanced.

Hermann takes hold of her right calf and lifts it over his shoulder to rest along his back, and Vanessa whimpers. She won’t last another minute, every muscle tense like this, starved after months with nothing but her fingers, and he knows it. His tempo increases; his tongue dips deeper; and when two long fingers slide inside her and curl, she opens her mouth and does not hear if anything comes out, deafened instead by the wave of her climax.

After it passes, Hermann stands again, but his fingers are still in her, and he kisses her and she tastes herself on him. He tries to press his hips against hers, and then snorts with frustration. He draws his fingers out of her. His lips find her ear. “Be a dear and turn around so I can fuck you, Vanessa.”

That’s as much filthy talk as Hermann ever does, but it shoots straight to her spine and gives her an aftershock. “Yes.” She’s grinning now. She lets go of the desk, turns to face it, and grips the edge once more, bending as low as she can with the extra weight and her legs already sore. Hermann steps out of his pants, then reaches past her to brace himself with one hand on the desk, and uses the other to guide the head of his cock to her cunt.

“You are dripping for me,” he whispers. Vanessa shivers. He doesn’t push inside her yet; she tries to buck but he grabs her hip and says, “You missed me. You’re aching, aren’t you?”

She whines, and it turns into a cry as he drives himself forward, hips slapping against her ass. He lets out a sigh and stays there for a moment, as deep as he can get, then pulls back and finds a rhythm, lazy but steady.

A few more strokes and then Vanessa starts to work with it, swaying on her toes to follow him. Hermann groans, and moves his hand from her hip to her hair. “Fuck,” she gasps as he twists his fingers into the curls, and pulls.

With her head bent back, Hermann sweeps his tongue up the side of her neck, says, “Bed,” and lets her stand up. Crossing those eight feet is an awkward business, his cock still in her, and she’s laughing by the time they get there, and then he shoves her onto the scratchy wool blanket and drives the air from her lungs.

It ought to be enough to make him come in moments: the lack of a condom, her hair in his hand, the sound of her breath coming in little gulps, the smack of their flesh. Still, it’s a while before Hermann says, “Lay down on your side,” and eases himself to the mattress behind her. His hip must be sore; Vanessa’s knees are raw. He comes that way, moving slow, his hands at her waist, his face pressed between her shoulderblades. Vanessa feels him shudder, hears the little low sound he always makes, and then his arm wraps around her, hand settling above her navel.

“Oh, graduated to touching it now, have you?”

“I wish you’d told me what you decided sooner,” he says into her hair, half asleep already. “So I could make plans. I’m not prepared.”

Shit, she unearthed the daddy issues. Not that they were ever buried deep. “I’ve had seven months, and I’m not prepared. Would you really have wanted to think about this when you were supposed to be working on predictive models?”

“I could have at least changed our schedule. You shouldn’t have had to stay up late for the calls.”

Vanessa twists to look at him. “I liked seeing your face before I went to bed.”

He gives her an honest-to-God smile, the kind that takes ten years off him. “I liked seeing yours when I woke up.”

“Now we get both,” she says, and kisses him gently before she settles back against him. Her drowsy contentment lasts only a moment before guilt pricks at her. Do something about it. Only move forward now. “I’m sorry for the uncertainty. I know you hate that.”

“Go on the tour with me tomorrow,” Hermann replies.

She has a weekend worth of clothes in her bag. “You’re completely crazy.”

“No more uncertainty. If you want to solve problems together, we’ll have to be together.”

That much is true. She can’t expect to go back to London without him and have everything magically sort itself out. But. “I have work to do.”

“Bring it with you,” Hermann mumbles. Because it’s that simple. “Or take a vacation. Do you want to fuck in every Shatterdome in the world, or not?”

That is the single most unprofessional and counter-protocol thing she has ever heard him say. “You make a compelling argument.”

“I know I do.” He finds her breast, palms it gently. He is very warm against her back.

“One condition.”

“Anything.”

“Set your alarm a few minutes early. I want to do a favor for Newton.”

She hears him mumble something about not wanting to know what sort of favor she’d do for Newton Geiszler or what he did to earn one, but he sets the alarm and turns off the light and pulls the blanket over them, and Vanessa falls asleep with Hermann’s arm across her and a feeling of rightness inside her that has not been there for a long time.


	3. Anchorage, January 2025

“Yes, I got the proofs. Thank you, Jenny, they look wonderful. Is everything arranged with the Pentecost Foundation?”

Reception from inside the Shatterdome is patchy at best, so Vanessa steps out of quarters and heads toward what she thinks is the nearest exterior wall. She finds a stairway and starts to climb, not trusting the elevator to work at all, let alone keep her call connected. Then she realizes there are another fourteen flights to the roof, but she keeps going, even after Jenny hangs up. She needs the fresh air.

Breathless, baby kicking from all the motion, she gets the roof access hatch open, and remembers that it’s January in Alaska. On the coast. “Fucking shit.”

On the landing behind her, the elevator arrives and Hermann steps out, her coat over his arm. Wordlessly, she takes it and puts in on, and he pulls up his hood and follows her outside. To the east, it’s too dark to see the spruce trees. Ahead of them, the sun has just set, and the only lights between here and the horizon are buoys on the water. The wind stings her nose, nothing but cold and salt.

She turns to look back at Hermann. His head is tilted back, hood fallen, eyes on the stars. “I’m not trying to change who you are,” she says, responding at last to the accusation he made just before she took Jenny’s call. She has to speak up over the wind, and the words sound harsher than she wants them to be. “Just… the way you behave, in certain situations…”

Vanessa can hardly remember what he said now, and it’s not that there was one particular statement that started this episode. He groused about her plans for after the tour, the fact that she’d be back in London for at least a couple more months, because one does not simply uproot a thriving business in the city where it’s based and relocate it to another country, particularly when one is in one’s third trimester and one’s midwife is also based in said city, and therefore one’s husband would be required to be present for a few weeks, and then they could start talking about moving permanently to Hong Kong. She knows he doesn’t really hate the idea, but he’s just incapable of not mentioning what an inconvenience it all is, as if she’s unaware.

“I know,” Hermann says, not looking away from the sky. “I just don’t understand why I’m always the one who comes away from this with a to-do list.”

“So give me one. Tell me when I do something that pisses you off.”

He looks down at last, scowling. “I do. I tell you as soon as you do it. The difference is that I don’t turn everything you do that pisses me off into an hour-long discussion.”

Now she has him. Vanessa struggles to hold back a smile. “There, let’s talk about that. You don’t like that I turn everything into an hour-long discussion. Is there a time limit you’d prefer, Doctor Gottlieb? Thirty-seven minutes? Thirty-eight?”

Hermann rolls his eyes and goes back to projecting whichever star charts he carries around in his head. Vanessa regards the whiteness of his throat, still visible in the dusk. The wind pushes her toward him. She puts her lips just above his collar.

“Is this resolved,” Hermann murmurs, “or are we skipping to the sex?” Vanessa hums against his skin. “Not up here, I hope. If you try to lick me, your tongue will freeze to my neck.”

“I can think of worse ways to die,” she says, and nips at him. “This was a horrible idea. Let’s go inside. Doctor Lightcap is probably waiting--”

Her phone rings. “Buggering fuck!” Hermann snorts, and she waves him back inside. The number looks familiar, but it’s not in her contacts. “Yes?”

“Vanessa? It’s Naomi Sokolov. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need a huge favor. I’m hauling ass here, six interviews a day, but I’m not scheduled for Doctors Gottlieb and Geiszler until Sydney, and I absolutely have to get this done before the tour ends. Can you talk to them for me? See if they can shift some things around?”

A calculation begins in Vanessa’s mind, fast and absorbing enough to make her disregard the fact that people have begun to refer to her husband as a unit with another man. She turns to look south. “I can’t promise anything, but if they do it, it’ll cost you.”

Ms. Sokolov only hesitates a second. “I’m listening.”

“Three thousand words, human interest, on the state of Kodiak Island since the Jaeger program moved out and the Kaiju Blue floated in. You can interview Alison Choi.”

“The Chois are on my roster for LA.”

“You’ll interview Alison. About Kodiak and the Jaeger program.”

“I can’t guarantee that my editor will go for a supplement like that. I can probably get it on HuffPo, though.”

Vanessa allows herself a smile, but doesn’t let it come through in her voice. “That will do. I’ll ask Hermann and Newton to fit you in before we leave Anchorage tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, I suggest you go look around Kodiak.”

Ms. Sokolov’s sigh carries through the phone as static. “You’re a hell of a businesswoman, Vanessa.”

She feels a twinge of sympathy for the reporter. The schedule they’re on would break anyone’s back, and Vanessa at least gets to sleep on the Jumphawk. “I know. Listen, I can sweeten the pot for you. Give you something no one else will run.”

Ten minutes later, negotiations concluded, Vanessa goes downstairs to the gutted lab of the Icebox, where Hermann and Newt perch on chairs that look like they were designed by Giger, all black segments curving ominously inward, barely recognizable as anything meant to cradle the human form. At a bank of terminals flickering to life, Tendo and Doctor Caitlin Lightcap run through baseline Pons readings. Marshal Hansen observes from a few feet away. “Hi, Vanessa!” Caitlin says from the other side of a colorful holographic display.

“Hi, Caitlin,” Vanessa replies with a tired, but genuine, smile. “Before you get started, could I have a minute?”

“No problem. That’ll give the quantum recorders time to spool up.”

Caitlin, Tendo, and the Marshal walk out, and Newton gets up too, but Vanessa says, “Please stay, Newt.” His expression goes from neutral to terrified in an instant, but he sits back down. Vanessa can’t help but laugh. “It’s all right. Naomi Sokolov is doing all the profiles for _Vanity Fair_ , and she needs to interview the pair of you sooner rather than later. Is it all right if she meets you tomorrow evening before we fly out?”

Hermann squints at her, but Newton glances to his left, and Vanessa wonders where that little gutcheck comes from, whether the obvious concern for Hermann’s fatigue would ever have happened before they Drifted. “Dude, we’re already doing three interviews a day,” Newton objects, rather weakly.

“So, four tomorrow, and two on the last day in Sydney.”

“She’s not going to drop it,” Hermann sighs, leaning back against the headrest. “I hope you struck a good bargain, darling.”

“Mm,” Vanessa confirms with a smile. “And with both your permission, I’d like to give her my copy of the photo I took before we left Hong Kong.” Newton looks doubtful, so Vanessa lays it on thick. “A full-color spread. Glossy magazine. Circulation: two million. It’ll be iconic. Otachi Junior finally gets the credit she deserves.”

Geiszler stares at her a moment longer. “I can’t decide if you should be in public relations or politics.”

“Neither, thank you.” She catches Hermann smirking at the ceiling as she goes to let the others back in.

“All right, gentlemen,” says Caitlin as she returns to her place at the console, “the board is green and we’re ready to begin. While I regret our lack of kaiju brains, the Drift overlay should give us at least some idea of where the hive mind is active in your minds. So squid caps on, please.”

While they arrange the diodes and Tendo moves about checking the connections, Caitlin glances to Vanessa. “You’ve never observed a Drift before, have you?” Vanessa shakes her head. “Okay, the first thing to remember is that nothing can go wrong here.”

Marshal Hansen brings a rolling chair over to her, and Vanessa takes it with a grateful nod. “No risk of neural overload, and no Jaeger to blow us all up,” he says. As Caitlin turns back to the terminal, the Marshal leans against the empty desk beside Vanessa and speaks quietly. “Is it true you’ve got a Striker jacket in the works?”

“A prototype,” she confirms. “It won’t go to production unless you give the go-ahead, sir.”

Hansen absently scratches his dog behind one ear. “I’d like to model it for your photos.”

She can’t stifle a smile. “I’ll have it shipped to Sydney.”

“Initiating neural handshake,” Caitlin announces, and Vanessa looks up to see two renderings of human brains merge in the center display. Hermann jolts like he just dreamt of falling. Newton grips the armrests. “Sixty percent… seventy and climbing, nice and smooth.”

The Pons makes a jarring noise, as if some of Hermann’s contrariness has bled into its systems and it just has to backtalk Caitlin. A bright red error message appears and the EKG readout starts to spike, but Vanessa’s staring through the display at Hermann, whose hands have gone white as he grips his cane. “So much for that,” Tendo says, rounding the terminal to stand by Caitlin.

“Should we pull them out?” Vanessa says, eyeing Hermann’s heart rate.

“Best thing to do is let them work through it themselves,” Caitlin tells her. “Otherwise it would be like waking a sleepwalker.” She glances over her shoulder, and must see the distress Vanessa’s wearing on her face, because she smiles and adds, “RABIT chasing is actually a good thing, in no-stakes situations. It’s a sign of high compatibility, and it means they speak the same mental language.”

“I could have told you that,” Vanessa mutters. “Is there any way to know what RABIT they’re chasing?”

“Not without a third compatible candidate,” Caitlin says. “Sorry, but we’ve never tested the Pons on a pregnant person.”

“I wasn’t going to volunteer.”

“Herc’s universally compatible,” Caitlin says brightly. She hasn’t so much as glanced at the display for half a minute now, but Tendo’s monitoring everything closely. “At least, we’ve never found anyone he’s not compatible with.”

The Marshal looks deeply uncomfortable. “I’d rather not go in there.” He gestures at the brain maps on the display. “It’s one of Doctor Gottlieb’s, though.”

Caitlin turns back, peering at the left display. “Good call! See the high hippocampus activity? And Newt’s occipital lobe is lighting up. Must be a great home movie.”

Vanessa chews her knuckle.

“Stabilizing,” Tendo reports. “Up to seventy percent… eighty-five… full alignment. Welcome back, Docs.”

Hermann and Newton open their eyes at the same time. When Caitlin says, “Have a look at this,” they lift their heads at the same time. Newton’s movements as they get up from the chairs, still wired to the Pons, are conservative--conscious of stiffness and imbalance, even if he’s not experiencing it directly himself. Hermann seems to have more energy.

Their eyes track in the same directions. When Hermann glances at her, she sees Newton’s heart rate rise on the monitor.

Vanessa tries not to be too disturbed.

What follows is rapid-fire technobabble, only partially verbalized from Hermann and Newton, but Caitlin and Tendo seem to keep up well enough as they all hash over the data that glows before them. She glances at the Marshal to see if he’s processing it any better than she is, but he just shrugs at her with his left shoulder. All Vanessa can glean is that there is no single area where the hive mind is active. On the display, all sorts of cognitive regions are experiencing activity that is unrelated to typical Drift signatures, and that makes a certain amount of sense.

“If the connection is always open,” Hermann pronounces once they’ve thoroughly analyzed the readings, “and there’s a constant quantum link between us and the Anteverse, then we are a liability to the program. Marshal, I’m resubmitting my resignation, effective upon return to Hong Kong.”

Vanessa gapes at him. Newton shakes his head furiously, and Hermann gives him a barbed look, and Vanessa realizes they’re yelling at each other in their heads about an argument they’ve had before.

“I can’t accept it, Doctor Gottlieb,” Hansen says quietly. “The Jaeger program needs you too much. It may give the enemy an advantage, but having you in our corner is too valuable.”

“Then station me elsewhere,” Hermann insists. “I can teach cadets. I don’t need Shatterdome access.”

“Don’t do it,” Newt says. Vanessa wonders if he isn’t about to have a panic attack right in front of all of them, and in the Drift. He and Hermann are both shaking a little.

“Newton, keep it to yourself,” Hermann snaps, and something clicks in Vanessa’s mind. “The Marshal doesn’t need your questionable influence to make a deci--”

“If the connection is always open,” Vanessa interrupts, “find a way to control it.”

There is an uncomfortable moment where everyone in the lab is staring at her. Hermann opens his mouth--to tell her that’s impossible, she’s sure--and shuts it again when Newton grabs his shoulder.

“You’re talking about throttling bandwidth,” Caitlin says. She leans back in her chair with the spacey expression she gets when she tries to conceptualize something that has no real analogue, despite the technological comparison.

“Limit what gets through,” Vanessa confirms.

Hermann looks positively exasperated. “How would we ever know it’s working?”

“Practice on each other.” Hermann and Newton exchange a doubtful glance. “Your connection is always open. Figure out how to block it. You haven’t received anything from the Anteverse since the Breach was closed, so there must be a way. Or maybe the quantum link is only active when a Breach is open--I don’t know, you’re the bloody mathematician.”

She huffs, remembering that they have an audience, and she’s not telling him off in private. For an instant, she wishes she could Drift with him and put everything she wants to say directly in his head, but then she remembers that goes both ways. And they haven’t made it look particularly fun.

For a moment longer Hermann considers it, then glances away from her. “Can we take these off now?” he says to Caitlin, who nods and dials down the Pons.

He yanks the squid cap off his head before the connection is cut; Newton shakes his head as if to clear it, then musses his hair back to the way he keeps it. “Where are you going?” he asks.

Hermann steps over to Vanessa and offers his arm. “To practice,” he says, and they head out of the lab.

“Doctor Gottlieb,” calls the Marshal, and Hermann stops just outside the door and turns to face him. “Once a decision is made, it’s made for the entire team. You and Doctor Geiszler stay with the Jaeger program.”

Hermann stands very straight, and Vanessa can practically hear him creak with the internal resistance to Hansen’s decree. But he only lets go of her arm and salutes left-handed, fingertips at his temple. “Sir.” The Marshal returns it, and Vanessa takes Hermann’s arm again, and they walk down the corridor, but not before she sees the triumphant expression on Newton’s face.

“I wouldn’t say you and the Marshal are at each other’s throats,” Vanessa begins. “But…”

“We’ve had differences of opinion,” Hermann says, walking fast, eyes stubbornly forward. That sounds like exactly what the fate of humanity doesn’t need. “It’s bound to happen when a Jaeger pilot gets promoted.” The disdain in his voice is the first instance Vanessa has heard him speak of a Ranger with anything less than the utmost admiration.

“Pentecost started as a pilot.”

“Marshal Pentecost started as an officer--there’s a difference,” he counters, but with a distracted air. He coughs a few times, clears his throat, swallows. A cold bug has been going around the tour since Nagasaki. She needs to find some orange juice before they leave Anchorage tomorrow. “Marshal Hansen doesn’t understand command, but he will eventually.”

She opens the hatch to their quarters, and as soon as it’s shut behind them, Hermann leans his cane against the wall and puts his mouth on her throat. “Mmm, hello,” Vanessa sighs happily. “Where did that come from?”

“You said I should practice,” he says against her collarbone. His hands move over her, trying to decide where to fondle first. “If I can keep this out of the hive mind, I can keep anything out.”

Vanessa recoils. “I’m thrilled to be part of your experiment, Doctor Gottlieb,” she bites. Hermann steps back, hands up, a gesture so completely Geiszler that he’d be mortified if he noticed. “You’re ghost Drifting,” she says, and he drops his hands at once, “so trying to shut off the hive mind wouldn’t do any good. What RABIT did you chase back there?”

Hermann lets out a breath, and turns away to sit on the bed. He meets her gaze again, challenging her to suss it out on her own, but she reached the conclusion in the lab, and this is just confirmation. Vanessa leans against the wall and rubs at her belly, which is suddenly churning. “Hermann. If your link to the Anteverse is active, have the kaiju watched us fuck?”

The laugh that escapes him is brittle, in danger of turning hysterical.

“Are you in love with Doctor Geiszler?” she asks, partly to give him something else to focus on, and partly because she can’t hold the question back anymore.

He goes still. “I’m no psychiatrist,” Vanessa continues softly, “but you two got stuck in a sex memory.”

“Vanessa,” he says at last, looking anywhere but at her, “I’ve shared more with Doctor Geiszler, via the Drift, than I have with almost anyone else. Possibly even you.” He takes a deep breath. “But I’ve made my decision.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“The same thing I told you last week. I haven’t been unfaithful to you.”

“That’s not what I asked.” It’s hard to control her voice. This is not the time for fucking games. “Are you going to make me repeat myself?”

Hermann stares at her miserably. Confirmation.

“What are we going to do?” Vanessa says softly.

“About Newton? Nothing.”

“Jesus, Hermann. I’m glad I’ve never Drifted with you.”

“Pardon me for being practical,” he spits. “We’ve already discussed the complications of adding one helpless small human to our circumstances. Do you really want two?”

He has no idea what they would be adding. Neither does she. Vanessa pulls her glasses off and rubs between her eyes. “I need to take a walk.” At Hermann’s indignated noise she soothes, “I’m not walking _out_ on you. I just need to think.” When she puts her glasses back on, his mouth is closed and his eyes are on something beyond the far wall of their quarters. She kisses the top of his head and goes.

She has no uncertainty about where she’ll end up, or what she has to do first.

C-Hex, the staff housing portion of every Shatterdome, always has the same layout, and the room assignments on the tour never change. When Vanessa knocks on the door of the room closest to what used to be LOCCENT, she is greeted by a two-headed creature. Both heads wear identical broad grins. “Heyyy, Vanessa,” says Tendo. “Felix, say hello to Vanessa.”

“Ness,” says Felix from his father’s shoulders, and Vanessa could melt into a puddle right there.

“And say goodbye to Vanessa, because you are getting a bath!” The Chois’ au pair must have the night off. Alison comes to the door as Felix, giggling, sways on Tendo’s shoulders all the way to the attached bathroom, one of the few in the Icebox with a tub.

“Everything okay?” Alison says, and Vanessa wonders if she looks as distraught as she feels. She shakes her head. “Come on in. Coffee?”

“Thanks, but I don't want to be up all night.” There’s a firm-cushioned military issue facsimile of a sofa in the main living area, and Vanessa slumps onto it. Alison joins her, and Vanessa leans against her, comforted by her solidity. “You heard about the Drift today?”

“Yeah, Tendo said it went great.” When Vanessa doesn’t respond, Alison adds, “Unless it didn’t.”

Vanessa picks at her sleeve. “When you and Tendo want a third, what do you say to them?”

Alison’s head snaps around so fast, Vanessa hears a couple vertebrae pop. After a long, stunned silence, she says, “We usually start by telling them that we have an open marriage. The conversation after that tends to be a good indication of whether anything will come of it.”

She can’t seem to find the right words for the next question. “And how do you… draw a distinction between the ones that are casual, temporary, and the ones that aren’t?”

“We don’t,” Alison says simply. Vanessa turns her head to peer at her. “Tendo and I have never gotten into anything casual. It’s best if you start out planning to be there for whatever that person brings with them--psychologically, emotionally. All the baggage. That way, even if you spend one night together and go your separate ways, no one loses anything.”

“That’s beautiful, and it sounds really hard.”

Alison’s laughter bubbles up from deep in her chest. “Why do you think most people don’t bother with more than one partner?” She grins at Vanessa. “Look, sweetie, nobody in this whole ‘Dome would turn you down. Maybe Becket, but only if you didn’t invite Mori along.”

Vanessa snorts. “You always know just what to say.” She sits up straight, legs folded underneath her, hands on her belly. “Time for a thought experiment. You and I went through the academy three years ago. We’ve got our own Jaeger.”

“What’s our Jaeger called?”

“It’s called Thought Experiment. We have five kills. We’ve been Drifting for years. What am I to you and Tendo?”

Alison leans her head back against the couch and thinks about it for a while. “To me, you’re what you already are, but moreso. I love you and I trust you. You’re my best friend. Tendo would probably be a little weirded out, what with the Drift hangover and even more inside jokes and the fact that we both would look really, really great in a drivesuit. What am I to you and Hermann?”

“Hermann has never had the slightest idea how to deal with you.”

“Ahhh, life goal. Here’s the thing, though. You don’t need to wonder about what it would mean to our husbands in this thought experiment. That’s not useful to your… situation. All you need to figure out is what it means to you, now.” Alison is about to say more, but her phone rings. This time, Vanessa recognizes the number. “The hell?”

“You should answer that,” Vanessa says, and kisses Alison’s cheek before she gets up. “Thanks.”

On the way to Doctor Geiszler’s quarters, Vanessa considers the microcosm of the Jaeger program. Practically nothing stays a secret on this tour, certainly not when Tendo makes it his business to be up in everyone else’s business. She has no doubt that before the tour is over, everyone will know all about whatever it is that’s going to happen tonight. But the upshot is that this is also probably the only group of people in the world who wouldn’t be liable to find it bizarre or grotesque.

A week ago, Vanessa would have found it bizarre and grotesque. Two weeks ago, it would have been unthinkable--the world was going to end. Now, they’re all still here. When possibilities stretch to infinity, strange configurations inevitably occur.

Newton comes to the door looking tired, and not at all surprised to see her. “Hi, Vanessa.” She wonders if Hermann warned him--a text, a ping over the PPDC intranet, the hive mind. Or maybe Newton just figured she’d show up eventually.

Quietly, not that anyone in the nearby quarters could hear them through the iron hatches, Vanessa says, “Are you in love with Hermann?”

For a few breaths he’s obviously trying to decide whether he can get away with lying, but finally Newton says, “Yeah.” He swallows and goes on, “Look, a couple weeks ago, Hermann basically said that he trusted me enough to let me see some really private stuff in his head. And I knew that was a big deal, but we both passed it off as desperate measures since the world was ending, right? Except today he did it again. I’m sorry, by the way. I didn’t get to see you in the Drift before, so I wanted to this time, and when I went poking around we ended up in a recent memory. A really happy one, too. Those feelings… He loves you so much, Vanessa.”

Vanessa lets out a ragged sigh, and he looks alarmed. “Finally,” she says, “a straight answer.” This choice of words becomes intensely funny to both of them at the same time. It’s therapeutic to laugh like that, the sound ringing down the corridor.

When she can breathe again, she says, “Please come talk to him.”

His jaw shifts, and Vanessa has a moment of cognitive dissonance, watching her husband’s mannerisms on another man’s face. “No, no way. He knows. There’s nothing to say.”

“You’re going to have to Drift again someday,” she presses, “and the hive mind will always be there.”

Newton shuts his eyes and shakes his head, just like he did back in the lab. She half expects him to stick his fingers in his ears and start singing.

“Newt.” She puts her hand on his shoulder, and he blinks at her. She raises her brows at him, pleading with her eyes. “I’m not going to feel okay with any part of this until the two of you talk, with words.”

He takes a deep breath, gathering his strength, and finally nods. “Okay. For you.”

Instinctively, as they walk together down the corridor, she puts her arm around his shoulders. She’s been where he is. Well, maybe not exactly, but the parameters were the same, the situation as uncomfortable, the results as unknowable, and she had to spell out for Hermann what she assumed he already knew.

She scans her keycard at the door and lets Newt inside. Hermann doesn’t shift his attention from a debugging app on his tablet. “What are you doing, Vanessa?”

“He followed me home.” No one laughs.

Hermann takes off his glasses and turns his chair to give them both a baleful look. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish, aside from sabotage. The last week has been good, hasn’t it? Aren’t we close to… something?”

The last week has been a honeymoon. The last week is not how the rest of their lives will go. “There’s no such thing as marital nirvana, Hermann. And if there were, it wouldn’t be attainable in circumstances like this anyway.”

“What the hell do you want me to do, then?”

“Talk,” she practically shouts. She yanks a pillow off the bunk. “Figure it out. Fight, or fuck, or whatever you need to do. I’m going to sleep on the Chois’ sofa, and I’m not coming back until you’ve resolved this somehow.”

She stomps past Newton and gets the hatch open. “Vanessa.” It’s harsh enough to stop her. She turns back to find Hermann on his feet, chin high. He says, voice quiet and even once more, “I didn’t complain about going back to London because I don’t want to go back to London. I complained because I’m not sure I can stay in Hong Kong.”

“This is not about us,” Vanessa says through her teeth.

His tone makes Newton flinch. “No, it isn’t, so will you bloody well listen for once?”

Vanessa glares at him as she shuts the hatch and goes to stand by Newton. Hermann draws a breath through his nose and continues, “During the double event, I advised Marshal Pentecost that the two kaiju had been sent to thin our ranks. I told him the only way to ensure the success of Operation Pitfall was to withdraw and let them take Hong Kong.”

Vanessa glances at Newt, who looks ill, but only shakes his head in response.

“Obviously, I was wrong. It wasn’t the only way. But the Wei triplets and the Kaidanovskys may have lived a bit longer, and with more Jaegers in Challenger Deep, perhaps Marshal Pentecost and Ranger Hansen would still be with us. It weighs on me. I’m aware of the moral reprehensibility of what I suggested, and I’m aware of how impossible the situation was, ten million lives measured against eight billion. I can’t stomach the idea that someone would remember me for that. I don’t want to remember it myself.”

There is a long, heavy silence. “I’m not sure what to do,” Hermann finishes, and sits down again, looking terribly old and frail.

Vanessa chews her knuckle. “The kaiju were sent specifically to eliminate the Jaegers?” Hermann nods. “Based on information they scraped out of Newton’s brain?”

Beside her, Newton’s entire being turns despondent. “It’s not your fault,” Vanessa tells him quickly, then turns back to Hermann. “Just like it’s not yours. No one person can carry all the blame for anything that happened during the war, let alone anything that _could_ have happened. I won’t let you try to do that. We won’t, will we, Newt?”

“No,” he agrees at once.

Vanessa crosses the distance between her and Hermann, sets the pillow back on the bunk, leans over him, and puts her hands on his cheeks. “And this,” she says softly, “is not that decision. No one has to be abandoned.”

The openness on his face tells her she’s hit the mark. She leans down and kisses him.

“So don’t leave the room, Vanessa,” says Newton, and she pulls away to look at him. “This is about you as much as us. Stay here?”

That sounds like the least she can do. She nods, and sits on the mattress. “Can we be scientific about this?” Newton asks Hermann.

“Do you have a hypothesis to test?”

“All I have is questions.”

“Me too. Start with those.”

Newton glances at Vanessa. “Is there any possible outcome where none of us have to feel shitty?”

Hermann shuts his eyes. If it wasn’t a gross misappropriation of PPDC facilities and transgression of his beloved protocol, he’d probably try to plot their possible outcomes in chalk on the concrete wall, narrating under his breath as he shows his work. _x, the quantity of people who feel shitty, is directly proportionate to…_ But then, Hermann has never been good with the formulae of human needs. “I don’t know,” he says after a while. “But if there is, the only way to find it is through a process that involves everyone feeling shitty. So don’t confuse the process with the outcome.”

“Okay.” Newton crosses the room to perch at the edge of the desk, which clearly infuriates Hermann, but he doesn’t say anything. “How much of this comes from the hive mind and the Drift, and how much of it is actually valid?”

“Irrelevant,” Hermann says.

“What?”

“Are you attracted to Vanessa?”

“Dude, how is _that_ relevant, but what I--”

“Just answer the question. I won’t be offended.”

Newton clears his throat and meets Vanessa’s eyes. “Vanessa, you’re gorgeous.”

“Yes, I know,” she replies.

“That’s not what I asked,” Hermann says.

“But that’s the problem,” Newton protests. “I don’t know how much of my attraction to her is me, and how much is the part of me that’s you now.”

Hermann smirks at him, a point scored. “That’s why it’s irrelevant. The part of me--” he taps his right foot with his cane--”that’s in you--” he pokes Newton’s combat boot, and there’s so much fondness in that act that Vanessa’s heart skips a beat--”is there permanently. The things you experience are valid, no matter their origin.”

“Yeah, that sounds like it’s all wrapped up in a neat little package, but what’s the conclusion?”

“We don’t have one yet,” Vanessa interjects, already sick of the scientific method, sick of trying to process Hermann’s feelings toward her inside someone else’s mind, still trying to wrap her head around the idea that her husband has enough warmth within him for two people, soon to be three. “It’s going to take longer than that to work through... whatever this is.” She gestures to encompass all of them.

“You just pointed at yourself,” Hermann says.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Doctor Gottlieb, I thought this concerned me too. Would you like me to leave after all?”

Hermann’s gaze is cool, detached. “Vanessa, are you attracted to Newton?”

“Newt, you’re very charmi--” She catches herself. No games. Not now. “Yes, I am.”

“What a bloody mess,” Hermann mutters.

“That’s what you get for asking me a question like that,” she snaps. “I haven’t had a reason to so much as _think_ about whether I’m attracted to anyone else for ten years, Hermann. How am I su--”

“Okay, that’s it,” Newton declares, getting up from the desk, hands raised in forfeit. “I’m not going to be the one who splits you guys up.”

Already retreating, and he hasn’t even seen the worst they have to offer. “If it’s going to happen, I’d rather it happen now,” Vanessa tells him. “Maybe the two of you would be happier together than Hermann would be with me. I won’t be anyone’s obstacle.”

“I’m not gonna do it,” Newton insists.

“That’s incredibly selfish.”

A slightly manic giggle escapes him. “Oh my God, can you hear yourself” He shakes his head and makes for the door.

“We’re still going about this the wrong way,” Hermann says. His voice is very quiet, but Newton still stops and turns back. “Black and white; either or.”

“Uh, yeah, I wouldn’t even know where to start with anything else,” Newton mumbles.

“You start by talking,” Vanessa says. “Unless you’d both rather start with sex,” she adds, with a halfhearted smirk.

“You’re not really joking,” Hermann says in his not-angry-just-disappointed voice.

This is deteriorating fast. So much for testing a hypothesis. “Maybe we should call it a night,” she sighs. “You have four interviews tomorrow.”

Newton nods and turns away again. “Yeah.”

“Newton.” Hermann gets up and walks to where Newton stands frozen, hand on the hatch. Vanessa thinks she knows what’s coming, and Newton must--he stiffens as Hermann gets close, but she’s sure they’re both surprised when Hermann takes hold of Newton’s jaw and kisses him. It’s closed-mouthed, but far from chaste. It lingers. When he’s done, Hermann looks from Newton to Vanessa. “There. Is the ice broken now?”

Vanessa opens her mouth to denounce him for his callousness, for toying with Newton just to make some kind of point that she’s not sure she understands because what she just saw may have broken something in her brain, but Newton snaps out of a daze and grabs Hermann’s lapel and pulls him back. She watches Hermann’s neck turn red above his collar, and wishes they were still hooked up to the Pons so she could see which parts of their brains light up, watch their heart rates rise.

Newton breaks the kiss and goes straight to work on Hermann’s jaw and neck, pawing at his clothes in advance of traveling downward. Vanessa has no idea how she’s supposed to just sit here and watch them go at it. Maybe she ought to start touching herself. Maybe she ought to remind them she’s here. “You smack of cigarettes,” Hermann complains in the breathy undertone he reserves for foreplay.

A realization hits Vanessa, and she has to remind herself to breathe. “Newt, were you smoking after the Drift test?”

“Um…” He pauses with a finger hooked into Hermann’s collar.

“Addictive personality,” Hermann says in a stage whisper.

“Shut up, Hermann. Unlike some people, I don’t hack into the PPDC database to look at my lab partner’s dossier, so I don’t have any dirt on you.” Newton looks back to Vanessa. “Don’t tell anyone I snuck cigarettes into a Shatterdome, okay? I needed to calm down, and I’m almost out of the last carton Sasha and Aleksis got me.”

“Hermann had a coughing fit on the way back here.” Newton looks up at Hermann, and the mirrored expressions on their faces make her laugh, despite everything. “You two have so much work to do. Fortunately, I like the taste of cigarettes.”

Hermann squints at her, then plants his cane and gives Newton a shove with his free hand. Newton stumbles, adorably, then pushes his glasses back up his nose and makes an effort at suaveness as he moves toward her. Vanessa stands to meet him, puts her hands on his shoulders, and leans down, hoping she looks a fraction as predatory as she feels. His stubble is surprisingly soft. She skips the preamble, puts her tongue in his mouth, and can’t hold back an “mmm” of satisfaction at the charred bitterness. Shortly thereafter, she makes a similar sound in response to his enthusiasm.

Newton’s hands are greedy, wrinkling her dress. He treats her entire upper body the way Hermann attends to her breasts. He traces the curve of her ear with one thumb for what must be thirty seconds straight, and that’s amusing on a rational level, but just now it makes something quiver inside her. They come up for air, and she matches his grin.

“It occurs to me,” says Hermann, and they both still and look over at him, “that there’s nothing Newton and I could do with each other that we wouldn’t know about in advance.” His eyes are half-lidded, and he braces himself heavily on the cane, leaning far forward to focus every iota of his attention on them. “Likewise, Vanessa, our repertoire is predictable, though undeniably effective.”

“Are you trying to say you want to watch?” Newton says, and Vanessa can’t tell if the hitch in his voice is excitement or terror.

“I’ll join you, in due time. Principally I’m interested to see how you work around that.” As he goes back to the desk, Hermann points at Vanessa’s belly, which is pressed tight to Newton’s gut.

Newton looks affronted on her behalf. “Dude, I think what you’re looking for is a position other than missionary.”

Vanessa resists the urge to bite her knuckle, and tries to decide whether she should step in or let them keep heckling each other until they kiss again.

“I’m proficient with other positions, you--”

“When’s the last time she rode you until you both came?”

Suddenly there’s a chill in the room. Hermann closes his mouth. “It’s been a few years,” Vanessa says softly.

The reason for this dawns on Newton. “Oh my God, Hermann, I’m sorry. Shit. See, this isn’t--”

Hermann holds up a hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “In fact, you just set the agenda for the evening.”

“Oh,” Newton says. He looks up at Vanessa. “I’m cool with that, if you are.”

In answer, she kisses him again, and now his hands move twice as fast, unknotting his tie, drawing down the zipper of her dress. While she unbuttons his shirt, he reaches behind her, and Vanessa hears Hermann open a desk drawer, toss something to Newton. He opens a crinkly foil package, and Vanessa reaches down to check on him.

“He’s been hard since he kissed me,” Hermann says with palpable smugness. “And you’re so wet I can taste you from here, darling.”

“Drift hangover,” she accuses, unzipping Newton’s trousers.

“Close quarters.”

They get each other undressed with minimal fumbling, and Newton takes his hands off Vanessa long enough to roll the condom onto himself and lay flat on the bunk. They both remove their glasses and set them on the nightstand.

Vanessa can count the men she’s been with on one hand, and could never have claimed to have a "type". Before her is a body so vastly different from Hermann’s, even without taking the tattoos into account, that for a brief, ridiculous moment, she wonders if sex will feel different. Of course it will. Everything will be different, not least a position she hasn’t used in half a decade, now with an extra twenty-five pounds of pregnant on her body. It will be a good workout, if nothing else--the sort of thing she ought to do often for the next two months, to build up her core strength.

She almost laughs as she ducks under the top bunk to straddle Newton’s waist. Some part of her has already accepted that this will continue to happen. Alison would be proud.

The instant Vanessa eases herself down onto Newton’s cock, Hermann takes a deep, deep breath and leans his head back, an expression of pure contentment on his face. She watches, fascinated. Maybe they should keep the hive mind connection open some of the time.

She looks down to find that Newt has his neck craned, looking at Hermann. Vanessa puts her hand on his cheek and makes him meet her gaze. “He does like missionary,” she confides. “It’s a good position for him--he has more leverage. Sometimes, he holds my wrists down. Like so.” She pins his arms at his sides, and Newt swallows.

Vanessa moves her hips, find a rhythm that’s slower than what he’d probably want, slower than what she wants, truthfully, but they have time. Newt tries to move with her, but she has him securely weighed down. Over in the desk chair, Hermann’s breath is uneven, his stare fierce. “He’s watching you,” Vanessa says, and Newt starts to look. “No, look at me, Newt. Just think about his eyes on you. Making sure you perform to standards.” Newt whimpers, eyelids fluttering, arms tensing in her grasp as he clutches the sheet. Vanessa stops moving at once. “Don’t come yet,” she says, grinning down at him. “Wait for me, Newt.”

He gets himself under control and nods, but before she can pick up the pace, Hermann says, “That’s quite enough cruelty for one night.” He retrieves Newt’s tie from the floor, gets up, and pulls it through the brace of the top bunk. Then he pulls Vanessa’s hands away from Newt, and loops the tie around her wrists in a proper scout’s knot. The top bunk is so low that she has to keep her head bent, so the restraint puts no weight on her arms. “Newton, don’t feel compelled to accommodate her. She can wait her turn.”

As soon as Newt’s hands are free, he puts one at Vanessa’s hip and cups her breast with the other, and he moves in earnest while Hermann is still on his way to his chair. “How long are you going to wait?” Vanessa says to Hermann’s back, struggling to make her voice even. “You haven’t even touched yourself yet. There are two possibilities,” she adds to Newt, who blinks up at her, trying to focus. “Either the hive mind connection between your dicks is so strong that Hermann is going to come in his pants when you do… or he’s an android.”

“Don’t make me gag you,” Hermann says over his shoulder.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Hermann jabs the floor with his cane, and holds it up, Vanessa’s knickers hanging off the end. “I’ll use these.”

Newt shudders and lets out a groan, and Hermann grabs the edge of the desk, and Vanessa clenches around Newt as he comes, red-faced and sweating and, once he opens his eyes, clearly embarrassed.

“Well done, Newton,” Hermann says.

Newton meets his eyes, then looks away. “Sorry, Vanessa,” he murmurs.

“You’ll make it up to me.”

He smiles like the sun. “Yeah, I will. Hermann, did you…”

“Sadly, Vanessa’s hypothesis has been disproven.”

“Wanna try some missionary?”

There follows an interlude of bickering over how best to arrange themselves on the bunk, and then Vanessa reminds them that she’s still there and hasn’t gotten an orgasm yet, and they incorporate her predicament into their bickering, but it is almost unanimously agreed that her wrists should remain precisely where they are. In the end it’s decided that Newt will lay sideways across the bed, legs hanging off, and after much assurance that yes, he knows what embolisms are and he’ll be careful, Vanessa will situate herself over his face, and Hermann claims that this is only okay with him because it means Newt won’t get to talk. There is another pause as Hermann takes inventory of the supplies PPDC Medical left in the desk before the Icebox was closed and ensures that they’re still usable.

Finally, Newt sits on the edge of the bunk, and he and Vanessa watch Hermann undress, a gradual shucking of layers that Newt clearly wants to participate in, judging by the way his fingers twitch, but this first time there’s something ritualistic about it. Vanessa looks at Newt’s face once Hermann removes his undershirt, and the reverence there suggests that he’s witnessing the holy of holies.

Five minutes later, Vanessa has Newt’s tongue in her as she watches Hermann ease two fingers into Newt, then three, then his cock, and Newt stops lapping at Vanessa just long enough to get control of himself, and then he starts up again, timing it with Hermann’s thrusts, and Vanessa wishes she could touch him, either of them, but the best she can do is look into Hermann’s eyes when she climaxes, and keep looking as Newt turns his face to pant little shallow breaths against her thigh, and keep looking as Hermann’s face goes slack and he drives himself forward once more.

One of them remembers to untie Vanessa, and she lays down at Newt’s side, his hand clasped in hers. Hermann is the big spoon, as ever.

“How much time do we have?” Vanessa asks. “Before there’s another Breach. Before they try again.” It’s not that she wants to spoil the afterglow, but this is suddenly the most important question in the world.

Newt blows out a breath. “You don’t want to get us started on that, Vanessa.”

“In sum,” Hermann says, “if the Precursors opened another Breach tomorrow, they’d have an advantage because we have no Jaegers.”

“If they wait a few years,” Newt says, and Vanessa can tell that this is neither an interruption nor a disagreement, just Newt finishing Hermann’s sentence, supplying what he’s too weary to say, “they’d have a chance to create something we aren’t expecting and can’t prepare for.”

“We’re still trying to work out which is more likely. I haven’t finished the models yet.”

They sound equally dismal to her. “If they try again, you’ll know, won’t you? Because of the hive mind.”

She feels Hermann hold his breath. “Probably,” Newt says. And that, she supposes, will have to do.

The only way to avoid the perils of uncertainty is to embrace all possibilities.


	4. Sydney, January 2025

Newt doesn’t go anywhere quietly, and Vanessa hears him from the latrine as he bounds into their quarters. “Who’s ready to get wasted on the PPDC’s dime?”

“Not me!” Vanessa calls over Hermann’s reply that under no circumstances will he allow Newton to make a drunken fool of himself in front of multiple world leaders and the press.

Newt’s reply is softer, and he and Hermann have a casual spat until Vanessa finishes her preparations and opens the door, and they both look up. The dress is a cream silk sheath, heavily altered. She’s wearing flats, because as Alison would say, hell no. The makeup is the best she could do with a travel kit. Still, she looks damn good. A smile flits across Hermann’s face, and Newt whistles low. “Outclassed,” he says.

“Perpetually,” Hermann tells him.

Newt looks away from Vanessa long enough to glare at Hermann. “Dude, I think it’s great that you rented a tux that almost fits you, but most days your shirts could conveniently double as graph paper if you run out in the lab. Do you honestly not feel embarrassed going out in public next to this vision?”

“What I feel is immense relief, because everyone’s attention will be on her.”

“Not tonight,” Vanessa says, stowing her kit in the luggage she’s already packed for tomorrow. “Are you nervous?”

The insouciant shrug that Newt gives her is a sure sign, as far as she’s learned to read him over the last several days, that he is. “Nah. I mean, I was a little bit, but I just went out to smoke.”

“Did you?” She walks over and kisses him, and yes, he did. Then she laughs and gets a tissue for his mouth. Her lipstick is a good color on him, but the press would talk. Save that for quiet nights in. “What are we going to do when you run out of cigarettes?”

“I guess I’ll have to find some other flavor you like, and get addicted to that.”

Vanessa thinks. “Like Hermann’s cock?”

Hermann has been pretending to read Vanity Fair for the span of this conversation, but she sees his eyebrows go up. Newt gives her a grin, then glances at Hermann and notices the magazine. “Oh, hey, is that the one with the thing?”

“Mm,” Vanessa confirms. “Page one eighty nine.”

He gets another copy from the stack left on the desk. They arrived at the ‘Dome that morning, with a sweet note from Naomi.

After all the profiles, the interviews with every last Jaeger tech, there’s a special supplement. Three thousand words, human interest. The photo that accompanies it is one Vanessa took just before they left Anchorage, on the helipad while Naomi waited out of the frame for the SD card. Alison stands with the wind from the sea and the Jumphawk rotors playing in her short hair, hands shoved in her coat pockets, looking straight at the camera, the colors of the sunset in the sky above her and her hometown somewhere far behind her. Below her is printed: What Now? What’s Left?

Naomi earned her early interview. People are already talking about Kodiak.

Vanessa’s other photo in this issue (and two credited photos in Vanity Fair might just launch her a new career) was cropped so Otachi Junior’s brain in its tank fills almost the whole frame. At one end, Newt has his elbow propped on a steel support strut, like this is a family portrait. At the other, Hermann is almost smiling. The photo editor enlarged the shot to fill a three-panel foldout. Newt folds it out. “God. Damn.”

The colors of the lab are hyper-saturated, and the disembodied kaiju brain floating in ammonia does look strangely beautiful, Vanessa has to admit. Strangely beautiful is how she’d describe the other two subjects as well.

She feels a trace of guilt about it--the photo was a favor for Newt, and Hermann was only wearing that expression for her. But it is a good moment. It’s nothing that any other photographer could have gotten from them. Their photos for the other interviews have been stiff, posed. This time the world gets to see them the way she does.

“Someone, somewhere, is going to wank to that,” she assures Newt.

“Newton’s going to wank to that,” Hermann mutters.

“Stop picking on him.”

“I can’t. Look at what he’s wearing to a formal function.”

“Hey, hey, nobody said formal!” Newt protests, a sly grin leaking onto his face. “They said… black tie.” He waves the tip of said tie at Hermann, and Vanessa groans. That’s worse than a Tendo joke.

As if on cue, the Sydney Shatterdome’s public address system comes to life with a burst of static. From a dismantled LOCCENT, Tendo declares, “All Jaeger program staff, please report to the mess hall for a big-ass party.”

For the next hour, Vanessa’s feet get progressively more sore. The Sydney Shatterdome’s mess hall benches have been replaced with round tables and white tablecloths and padded folding chairs, but hardly anyone sits. Instead, a swarm of suits from every country moves in ways that appear random, but after a moment Vanessa sees the patterns. Politicians spiral toward certain points, waiting for a chance to speak with Becket and Mori, or the Marshal. Orbiting them is the press, facilitating more photo ops and swooping in occasionally for soundbites. The suits group more loosely around the techs, take fewer pictures, but still a phone’s flash sparks somewhere in the mess hall every few seconds.

Vanessa eyes the stairs up to the mess hall’s second level. From there this would all look like a marvelous bit of choreography. But she doesn’t let go of Hermann’s arm, because the first round of people have just figured out who they are.

She holds the phones and takes the pictures. It makes sense that way, and it gives her something to do instead of stepping awkwardly out of frame. Vanessa volunteers, smiling, before anyone can embarrass themselves by asking.

Still, to each new world leader Hermann introduces her smoothly as “my wife Vanessa. She designs Jaeger apparel that helped fund us for the past several months.” Most of them have the good manners to look like that’s important to them, to thank her almost as graciously as they thank Hermann and Newt for what they did. And to be fair, they’re all probably as clueless about Vanessa’s work as they are about comparative biology, Breach physics, or the Drift.

Tendo brings water for her, champagne for Hermann and Newt. In fact, each time Tendo passes by, he has at least three glasses in his hands, despite the fact that the caterers brought their own champagne servers. It takes Vanessa half an hour to realize he isn’t just being the den mother--that way, he can’t shake hands with any suits.

Just as Vanessa’s stomach starts to rumble, Alison comes to collect them. “Excuse me, Ms. Prime Minister, but the Marshal is about to speak, and we’re holding seats for these three.” As she ushers them out of earshot and toward their table, Alison says, “Hey, how many K-Sci officers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Newt glares in advance, and Hermann lets out a dramatic sigh. “How many?” Vanessa says.

“I have no idea, but I’ll have a full report on your desk by Monday.”

“Har dee har har,” Newt mutters. “Never gets old, Alison.”

“Actually, the answer is zero,” says Hermann. Alison glances at him. “We call J-Tech to take care of that.”

Alison snorts, and Hermann smiles.

When they reach their table, Vanessa hangs back and touches Newt’s arm. “Are you all right?” she says, softly enough that Hermann won’t hear.

He gives her a guilty look. “Jitters,” he admits. “It turns out being a rock star kind of sucks. Don’t worry though--I’m not letting it into the hive mind.”

“Maybe you should,” Vanessa murmurs.

“Uh. What?”

“Are you familiar with Doctor Lightcap’s story?”

“The story that should have been hers to tell or not tell, rather than Doctor Schoenfeld’s?” Newt glares about the mess hall, not that Doctor Schoenfeld is here--but Naomi is, somewhere.

“That’s the one.” A debate about Jasper Schoenfeld’s ethics can wait, and anyway, Vanessa is pretty sure they’d be on the same side of that one. “It’s just another way to share the neural load, isn’t it?”

Newt looks doubtful. “I mean, there’s no guarantee that would work for anyone else, or work the same way in the hive mind as the Drift, and even if it did, why would I want to do that to Hermann?”

“I’m not suggesting that you spring it on him out of nowhere,” Vanessa soothes. “If you asked, he’d probably say yes.”

“Will you two sit down?” Hermann demands, and Vanessa gives Newt a rueful glance, and takes her seat. “I’m not half as frail as you both seem to think I am,” Hermann says into his champagne flute before he takes a swig.

Vanessa glances away, and takes Hermann’s hand. “Sorry,” Newt says, wincing. “I just--”

“Go on, Newton. Open up.”

Newt takes a deep breath. As far as Vanessa can see, nothing is different--just Hermann’s thumb tracing circles on the heel of her hand, gently, over and over. And if she’s going to be his worry stone, the one he leans on when Newton leans on him, well, she figures she can do that.

She looks for Alison, and finds her at the other side of the table, standing near her husband and the Marshal. Hercules Hansen looks deeply uncomfortable, back in his dress blues again, and as Vanessa watches, Tendo straightens the strap of the Marshal’s sling over his epaulets, and dusts him off a bit. Vanessa freezes.

“What’s wrong?” Hermann asks, and she forces herself to loosen her grip on his hand.

“Nothing.” She catches Alison’s eye and gives her an inquiring look. Alison nods once, brows up, and Vanessa has to use every trick she knows to keep a grin off her face. “Nothing’s wrong,” she tells Hermann.

The Marshal strides to the podium at the front of the mess hall, and every table with Jaeger program staff goes quiet. A moment later the politicians and the press catch on, and Marshal Hansen stands before them in silence. “We owe our thanks,” he begins, “and the world owes its thanks, to many of the people in this room. The Jaeger program has, since its inception, been a culture of cooperation. Without our remarkable staff, ground crews, scientists, and Rangers, working in concert and without petty rivalries and feuds, we would have lost this war long ago.

“But when it came to winning the war, there’s only one person we can credit. There’s one person who, in the face of defunding, and decommissioning, and the devaluation of everything we worked toward for ten years, nevertheless kept us all focused on the preservation of humanity, on victory, not surrender. There is one person who gave your children a future, and he isn’t in this room tonight.

“If he were standing here, I’m not sure what he’d say to all of you. But I believe I know how he’d proceed. It’s going to require cooperation. It’s going to require us to learn from the past, to renounce those old rivalries for good, even though our way of life is no longer threatened. We’re going to have to believe in each other, to trust each other, in order to move forward.

“I only hope that we’ll be able to make Marshal Pentecost proud. Thank you.”

The Chois are the first to stand. By the time Herc returns to the table, everyone in the mess hall is on their feet. Hansen’s seat is two spots away from Vanessa; Hermann makes a point of going to shake his hand as Vanessa leans across the empty chair and whispers in Newt’s ear, “That was the fiercest thing I’ve ever heard.”

When Hermann gets back, the caterers are rolling out food carts, and the press descends for reactions. Vanessa feels a hand on her shoulder and turns, ready to snap off a “no comment,” but it’s Naomi leaning down beside her seat.

“Vanessa,” she says, softly enough that the others won’t hear, “I wanted to run something by you. Your photos are excellent, and I know you have more floating around.” Vanessa opens her mouth, and Naomi holds up a hand. “I’m not asking you for those. I was just thinking what a shame it is that the victory tour has only gone to Shatterdomes. I’m sure there are a lot of people who want to show their appreciation, but couldn’t travel to the Pacific. Would you consider putting your work in a traveling exhibition? With proceeds going toward the Jaeger program in whatever form it takes next, and the Pentecost Foundation?”

“I--” God, what a time to spring something like that. Vanessa stares at her salad, acutely aware of her hunger, sore feet, growing headache; the cares she’s had to bear, just this evening, for Hermann, for Newt, for herself, for the odd knot they all make, for what it’s going to be in three months’ time, in five years’ time, in a lifetime. How much does she want to add to that, now of all times?

“Yes,” she says, and Naomi brightens. “I’ll consider it,” Vanessa stresses, but the reporter’s smile doesn’t diminish.

“I’ve got the connections to help make it happen,” Naomi assures her, rising. “Just let me know what you decide. Please excuse me.” And she’s off to ask someone else hard questions.

Hermann is watching her, one brow raised. In the next seat, Newt obliviously tears into his food. Across the table, Tendo and Ranger Becket trade quips, and that much levity almost feels wrong after the Marshal’s speech. But the more she thinks about it, the more right it feels that this is not some dour wake, but a celebration of sorts, a deep breath before everyone gets down to whatever is next. Five minutes ago she saw tears in Mako’s eyes; now the Ranger eats in silence with a smile on her face. Even Marshal Hansen looks as though a weight has been lifted.

Vanessa squeezes Hermann’s hand. “How soon can we get out of here?”

He leans over and kisses her cheek, and Vanessa blinks in surprise. “Not soon enough,” Hermann whispers.

Back in their quarters, she washes her face and peels the dress off, and stares at herself in the mirror for several minutes. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. Finally she blows out a sigh and switches the light off.

She steps out of the latrine, and nearly trips. There haven’t been many times in her life when Vanessa has felt off-balance: six inch heels on the runway for the first time, staring up at a Jaeger for the first time, reeling with a positive pregnancy test in her hands. Kissing Hermann in the dark in Cambridge.

Seeing Hermann face down on the bed, eyes tightly shut and breathing deep through his nose, while Newt slides two fingers into him--that makes her dizzy.

Hermann must feel her watching. He opens one eye, and holds out his hand to her. She crosses the little room and sits beside him, puts her fingers in his hair. He exhales.

“Good?” Newt says after a moment.

“Good,” Hermann says, and Vanessa lays down on her side and kisses him as Newt moves. Hermann holds on to her hand and keeps his mouth on hers, even when Newton changes angles and Hermann starts to mewl, very softly. Vanessa eases her free hand under his hip and grasps his cock. There’s a towel under him; they planned ahead. A few heartbeats later, he and Newt come at the same time.

They all breathe together for a while, and then Newt lifts his head from Hermann’s back and moves to eat Vanessa out, and Hermann puts one hand on her breast and one in her hair and kisses her face, and dimly she thinks those bastards must be hive-minding this somehow, they’re definitely synchro--

Well, between the two of them, she loses count.

Later, when they’re cleaned up and tangled together on the mattress and Vanessa is one contented breath away from warm, dreamless sleep, Newt murmurs, “Tour’s over tomorrow.”

“Here comes the maudlin,” Hermann sighs.

“Look, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say you two are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. So yeah, you bet I’m bummed out that the epic road trip is ending. Things are going to change, aren’t they? Things have to change.”

Always. Vanessa takes Newt’s hand, but when she speaks, it’s not to him. “Hermann, if they reopened Kodiak for production and training, would you go?”

“I--what?” For an instant she feels bad for springing that on him the way Naomi snuck up on her earlier, but there isn’t any more important question in the world right now. She can feel Newt’s tension, and she realizes with a jolt that she doesn’t need the hive mind for that. “I’m not…”

“You miss the aurora sometimes,” Newt says softly. Hermann lets out a breath, irked that Newt would verbalize it, but Vanessa doesn’t need the Drift to know about that either. He left her a voicemail the first night he saw it, describing the intensity of the colors, the gracefulness of the dance.

“What would that solve?” Hermann demands at last.

“It’s not a solution,” Vanessa tells him. She touches his face. “Only a possibility.”

She feels him relax, just a little. “I’ll think about it,” he says, and eventually, they sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All that's left is the epilogue, which should be done this evening. This fic was part of the PacRim minibang, so awesome artwork by tentakrule will accompany it at some point in the near future. Thank you for reading!


	5. Kodiak, July 2027

“... and it turned out they installed a right-hand knuckle feedback coil in the left gauntlet. The newbs I have to work with these days, you wouldn’t believe. A mistake like that never would have gone unchecked all the way to head engineer ten years ago.”

“We have to build some kind of workaround into the OS. There’s no reason the 02 pilot should feel like their finger is being bent backwards just because someone swapped out an identical part.”

“Don’t you dare make accommodations for my green-ass assembly crew, Doctor. I’ll whip them into shape before a new Breach opens.”

“Guys,” Tendo says as they’re finally escorted to a table, “can we _please_ not talk about work tonight? That’s kind of the point.”

Alison smiles and pats his arm, and Hermann gives Vanessa a sheepish look. “Who has Felix tonight?” Vanessa asks the Chois.

“The Marshal,” Alison says. “He just got in this morning for a look at the Mark-6s. Sorry--I know, work.” She waves off Tendo’s stare.

The waiter arrives for drink orders. “Water, please,” says Alison, and Vanessa stares at her. “What? I can’t drink water?”

“And the rest of us,” Tendo says smoothly, “will be splitting a bottle of 2012 Napa. To celebrate.”

“Oh my God,” Vanessa breathes. “Whose--” And then she claps her hand over her mouth, because if that’s not the stupidest bloody question, the kind that might be asked by someone who isn’t in the _exact same sort of relationship_ , not that the two relationships are in any way comparable, but still…

Hermann rubs his thumb against the heel of her hand, and that brings her back. Alison is laughing at her--not out loud, but trying and failing to keep her face solemn and her shoulders from shaking. Tendo clears his throat. “We figure we’ll find out at birth, going by the hair.”

“I can understand basing it on whether the baby is ginger or has a pompadour,” Hermann says, squinting from Alison to Tendo and back, “but what if they have a ginger pompadour?”

Alison stops trying to hold back her laughter, and Vanessa and Tendo join her. Hermann looks very pleased with himself indeed. They’re still laughing when the wine arrives.

As the waiter fills three glasses, Vanessa catches Hermann eyeing her speculatively. She puts her hand on his knee and says, “No.”

The first sip of the wine is smoky, a memory of an era none of them will ever get to live through again. Vanessa holds it on her tongue for a long time. “Give me some of that,” Alison orders, and Tendo stops holding his glass out of her reach long enough for her to take a drink, and Vanessa sees it on her face. Sees, too, that even in places where nothing grows, things can still be built.

They get home late, but the sun is still up, a phenomenon that wreaks havoc with toddler bedtimes. Which means that when they open the front door, Ada sprints into Hermann’s arms, damp-haired and giggling and in her pajamas. Newt appears a moment later, and immediately puts his head on Vanessa’s shoulder. “I don’t know how you manage, Vanessa. I really don’t.” Half his shirt is soaked, and there’s a glob of something on his collar that is almost certainly the same cornstarch-and-water solution that’s already permanently altered Hermann’s favorite coffee table.

Vanessa kisses his cheek. She almost tells him how she manages, but instead she tells Ada to say goodnight to Daddy and Newt, and carries her down the hall. She turns on the star projector and winds up the music box and rocks in the glider until Ada’s head lolls, which doesn’t take long. Then she sets her daughter in her crib and tucks the quilt around her, and leans down to kiss her forehead.

She manages because every day is a gift, snatched from the jaws of the kaiju. She manages because her daughter gets to grow up in a world that is--if not _safe_ , then at least defended, at least in the best possible hands. 

She figures it’s wise not to tell Hermann and Newt any of that outright, though. Might go to their heads.

Vanessa shuts the door to Ada’s room behind her and goes back down the hall, and steps into the bedroom, and then freezes. She was expecting a light on. The hell is--

“Hey, Vanessa,” Newt says, very close to her. “We’ve been working on something new. I can find Hermann in the dark. Wanna see? Not literally, of course.”

She takes a deep breath. “Yes, Newt.”

“Cool.” She can hear his grin. “I’m just gonna…” He unzips her dress and steadies her as she steps out of her shoes, then moves close enough that she can feel his erection against her leg, and puts his hand at the small of her back. “This way. I’ve got you.”

By the time she thinks they must be close to the bed, everywhere he’s not touching is covered in gooseflesh. And then she feels warmth before her and Hermann whispers, “There you are,” before his hands sweep over her and his tongue goes to her neck, and Vanessa closes her eyes, stops trying to see in the dark, because she’s between them and she’s home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S DONE AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
> 
> Thanks for reading. I'm hauntedjaeger on the tumblrs.


End file.
